What’s more challenging than a party with deep divisions? A party with deep divisions running on no sleep. Thanks to a handful of committee overnighters, where members slogged through hundreds of amendments to the “one, big, beautiful bill,” Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) chamber is more than a little irritable. “I’m very grumpy,” Democrat Debbie Dingell (Mich.) told reporters after sparring over Medicaid reform for 26 and a half hours in Energy & Commerce. And she’s not the only one.

The mark-ups weren’t record-setting, at least not in length (a 2017 debate to repeal Obamacare lasted a full 27 hours). But you wouldn’t know it from the members’ coping mechanisms. “I’ve had four Celsius,” Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) admitted of the popular energy drink. “I’m on my third can of Zyn.” His colleague, Texas’s Dan Crenshaw (R), replied, “I believe those are not strong enough.” His idea for keeping people awake? Bringing a turntable to a room off the House floor to keep spinning tunes through the wee hours.

Some members just succumbed. In videos that went viral on social media, Democrats Dingell and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (Ill.) were caught snoozing. In good humor, Dingell posted later that she’d closed her eyes “to think about an America where everyone has access to quality, affordable health care.” Utah’s Blake Moore (R) was out cold, so much so that the vote counter kept calling into the microphone, “Mr. Moore… Mr. Moore…” After a few seconds, Minnesotan Michelle Fischbach (R) finally nudged the young Republican awake, at which point everyone laughed and he took a bow.

Like the Senate’s infamous vote-a-ramas (where pepperoni rolls are launched across the room and impromptu poker games break out), this all-nighter featured “waves of emergency takeout, loads of caffeine,” nicotine (Hudson’s go-to), and plenty of cranky members. On the Democratic side, The Hill reports, there was ample “Cava, Chinese food, piles of bagels and a vast array of juice options.” For Republicans, “it was Greek, pizza and strawberry toaster strudel.”

Georgia’s Buddy Carter (R), a pharmacist by trade, joked that he “may not be taking drugs … but I’ll tell you, I sold a bunch of them!”

The fruit of the grueling process was worth it, Johnson believes. Thanks to the committees’ work, Republicans are three steps closer to bundling the bills together, which, as most will tell you, is difficult enough. In the meantime, the reviews of the legislation (which all passed on party lines) are mixed. As usual, fiscal conservatives think the bills’ reforms to Medicaid and Medicare don’t do enough to rein in out-of-control federal spending, while moderates complain that even common-sense changes risk their purple districts’ support.

Instead of cutting backroom deals and forcing the rank-and-file to accept them — something for which many of his predecessors were famous (and for which they were rightly criticized by conservatives) — the speaker hosted a meeting with both sides of his “warring” caucus earlier Thursday. Since just a few Republicans could sink the whole massive bill designed to pass the Senate with only Republican votes, he gathered members of the “SALT caucus” (a handful of GOP members from New York, New Jersey, and California who are primarily concerned about the federal income tax deduction for paying the high state and local taxes in their states) and members of the House Freedom Caucus to try to hash out their differences with trillions of dollars on the line. One thing in Johnson’s favor is that Donald Trump hasn’t leaned on Republicans to unite yet, and that weapon is still very much at his disposal.

After a week of liberal members of the caucus publicly decrying efforts to reform and save Medicaid, conservatives like Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) are pushing back, insisting that they can’t support the draft as is. To overcome those disagreements, the speaker told reporters that he plans “to work through the weekend on reconciliation” to meet the Memorial Day deadline. The conversations, he said, were “productive.” “Not everybody’s going to be delighted with every provision in this bill,” Johnson reiterated, “but everyone can be satisfied.”

Some members share the speaker’s signature optimism. Carter, who joined Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Wednesday’s “Washington Watch,” insisted, “I’m very proud of the product that we put out in the Energy and Commerce Committee. It is really good. What we did was we improved one of the most important programs in our government, and that is Medicaid.”

And there are some significant wins for families to celebrate. On core values issues, the Georgian was most excited about “ending the gender transition funding [for children] in Medicaid. It’s not going to happen. Taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be used to fund child abuse,” he stressed, “and gender transition is child abuse.” Republicans also, Carter explained, “abandoned abortion funding in Medicaid. Taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be going to organizations that provide abortion services. It’s as easy as that.” Planned Parenthood, he fumed, “should not be getting one red cent a year. They should not be getting anything.”

Elsewhere in Medicaid, one of the biggest political hot potatoes for Republicans, Energy and Commerce members also managed to make some headway on the Democrats’ radical expansion of the policy under Barack Obama and COVID. Axios dubbed it “the biggest rewrite in the program’s 60-year history,” which is certainly an accomplishment after decades of abuse under Democratic administrations.

In addition to work requirements for the 19 to 64-year-olds on the plan, the version that passed would also “scale down enrollment” from Obamacare, when 20 million more adults were added (despite being above the federal poverty line). Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) argued that it’s only fair for able-bodied enrollees to pay a premium for their insurance (just like private plans require), so the GOP has built in some wiggle room for cost-sharing and possibly co-pays for the people who wouldn’t have qualified under the original rules. In their minds, the states should — and will — also play a much bigger role in how Medicaid is implemented.

But in their steady stream of fearmongering, Democrats continued to claim that 14 million Americans would be kicked off Medicaid if this bill passed. And yet, as even Axios points out, that includes about four million people who were set to lose coverage anyway when the Obamacare premium tax credits expired at the end of this year. The real number, Republicans say, is closer to eight million people — who, let’s be clear, wouldn’t lose their health insurance, they’d simply have to pay for it like the rest of the country.

All in all, Politico underscores, “the draft bill the committee advanced Wednesday didn’t include many of the most controversial changes that had been considered, and Republicans on the committee appeared satisfied. But hard-liners” (that’s how liberal media outlets refer to fiscal hawks) “elsewhere in the GOP conference are still demanding even steeper cuts and complain the work requirements don’t kick in until 2029.” (As fiscal hawks point out, postponed savings could easily be “magically” undone by a future Congress.) These conflicts will have to be sorted out before the House votes on the full package — which is tentatively scheduled for next week.

From here, the basket of committee bills will head to the Budget Committee, which will roll them all up into one big “mega-bill” of Trump’s priorities. Easier said than done, most acknowledge. To stick to his original timeline, Johnson will then have to get the legislation before the Rules Committee on Monday.

“You know,” Carter said, “the speaker and leadership warned us early on, ‘Don’t draw any red lines. Don’t say in the media, ‘I can’t vote for it if it’s got this-and-that. Don’t paint yourself into a corner.’” Echoing Johnson, he continued, “There are things in this reconciliation package that I’m not necessarily going to like, and that I would like to change, but you have to look at it in its totality. And you have to understand just how important it is. If we don’t get it done,” he warned, “88% of Americans will be looking at the highest tax increase they’ve ever had.”

So, yes, it’s a moment that conservatives should seize to cut back as much as they can. But also, Perkins chimed in, “People need to understand [that] we’re talking about 220 Republicans, and they come from a variety of districts, backgrounds, and ideological makeups. And so, reaching consensus is a part of the legislative process.”

Carter nodded. “It’s a very diverse conference. We’ve got some people in swing districts and swing seats [who have] some strong feelings. And then we’ve got some other people in deep red seats, and they’ve got strong feelings.” But, he reminded people, “At the end of the day, we’re all on the same team. We’re all trying to achieve the same thing. And we need to understand that we need to come together.”